


Without You Here

by orphan_account



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Art, Artist Grantaire, Drugs, Enjolras has glasses?, Enjolras is Dead, Gen, Grief, M/M, Sad, Self Harm, descriptive writing, implied suicide, paintings, passive voice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-09-21
Packaged: 2018-04-22 15:58:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4841579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A piece of writing from my creative writing class in 2013. Prompt: tell a story without using typical methods of narration.</p><p>It's a les mis fic, although I never give names it's Enjolras and Grantaire. The reader is someone looking at the paintings Grantaire left behind, seeing his story and his feelings for Enjolras, who has died.</p><p>As I said, written in 2013, but I left it unedited since it belongs to 2013 me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Without You Here

An arm is lying on a desk, sleeve rolled back and the pale, inner side turned up. The subject’s other hand is holding a syringe and injecting liquid into a vein. However, the vial’s liquid is bright green as opposed to the dull brown or clearness of typical heroine, and the ink is going beneath the skin on the arm to spread out into leafy vines and dark ivy climbing around the subject’s arm. The plants are outlined in a darker ink, either a dark green or black, and the color from the vial is filling in the lines and shading in itself to produce a variety of shades and hues. The medium used are colored pencils and ink to provide detailed shading to rival well done oils but with the control of a pencil over a paintbrush.

 

~*~

 

A man is being pulled out of a river. The moon shines high above yet the scene is cast in bright enough light to make it look like day. The man, who has the tattoo on his arm as shown in the first picture, is being fished out by an angel emitting a strong golden glow. His eyes are bleary and his body limp, perhaps in the action of waking up or nearly falling asleep. The man’s angelic friend looks down at him with familiarity, a gentle smile and soft eyes gazing from behind a pair of glasses. The man himself is soaking wet with messy dark curls and sunken in eyes, an ugly mess compared to the beautiful being saving him from drowning. This picture is also done with lots of colored pencils along with some inking, but this time a yellow pastel has been used over the other layers. The angel is outlined with a yellow glow made from laying down a thick layer of pastel around the outside of him and then sharply smudging it outwards.

 

~*~

 

It’s the same man again, this time looking better groomed but still burdened with a weak and pale body that belongs to illness. His angelic companion is present again but this time his glow does not light up the world as much as it used to. The sickly one is being held by the angel, his face and body are mostly hidden by the wings that hold him but the visible parts are basked in the luminescence of his friend. They’re sitting somewhere, perhaps a bed or somewhere out on the ground but it’s impossible to tell because the scenery is blurry and dark, unimportant. It’s created with the same techniques and mediums as the last piece.

 

 

~*~

 

The person is sitting in a counseling office. The lighting is warm and yellow, the room decorated with plants and a couple of comfy chairs facing the psychiatrist’s desk. Despite the friendliness of the room, the doctor is worried and the patient distraught. Whatever has been said or done, the angel is no longer there. The openness and comfort of the room does nothing to alleviate the tension and how upset the man is. While the other drawings have been made in an effort to be smooth and detailed, this one is far more sketchy and angular, the ink now not used to clean up lines and make them look fluid but to accent dark spaces and create harsh contrasts.

 

~*~

 

For the first time, the paper is divided in half, vertically, into two scenes. On the left the angel is back again. The man is somewhere outside, the details faded and blurry in the background and the only thing for sure that could be said is that it’s just past sunset and he could be near a forest. The man’s eyes are closed and his friend is holding him from behind, wings wrapped around him in a protective and comforting gesture. The world is bright and not very focused in contrast to the other scene next to it. In that, his eyes are open and the angel is gone. The background is clear now, a street by a forest road, somewhere mundane. The late evening sky is detailed clearly and so much of the road and trees are detailed that it looks like the artist was feeling bored and had time to kill.

 

~*~

 

The art style has been changing little by little as the days go by but this one is by the far the outlier. There is no scene or subject aside from pure frustration and anger like the Hulk tried to take up art. The canvas had been tacked down and then assaulted by art supplies. Blotches of ink and paint are splattered thickly over the whole canvas and go off the frame of the canvas. Many of the colors are dark and some of the marks make it look like a paintbrush was thrown at the canvas to create the distorted brush prints. To finish it off the canvas has been stabbed in a few places with a knife hard enough to make holes, and a few larger holes suggest that the artist had stood back a ways and thrown a knife at the canvas.

 

~*~

 

Despite the beating the art supplies must have taken from the last painting, this final painting is the most beautiful and detailed of them all. Entirely done in oil paints, it probably took days to complete. The scene for once is completely peaceful. The artist is sitting in a bright meadow against a tree and his friend is beside him though no longer glowing. Perhaps it’s because the place where they are is so bright a glow would hardly show, or that when two beings are of the same world they don’t appear ethereal to each other. The artist’s new wings are tawny and spotted, majestic to be sure to not quite as grand as his friends’ golden ones. They’re snuggled close to one another, wings and arms wrapped slightly around the other and their sides pressed together. Before now the artist’s friend had looked perfect, now his face and part of his right shoulder is heavily scarred. The scar running across his shoulder is deep and goes in a straight line done to be hidden by his shirt, while the right temple and side of his face has deep scars that have healed far more than they probably would have on earth. The artist himself has deep vertical scars running down his right arm and the glimpse of his left shows that the tattoo was important enough to stay intact despite the implication in the first picture that he’s right-handed. Both have their eyes closed in a deep sleep, enjoying a serene world, perhaps a world in between worlds, away from the cruelty of earth and separated from what would be their bustling neighbor, the kingdom of God. Down in the wild grass the artist used a paintbrush to write out a message in black paint that reads:

 

Forgive me


End file.
